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Denise Robitaille
Published: Tuesday, April 10, 2007 - 21:00 As an auditor, I get to hear about all sorts of problems that have arisen because of something out of the company’s control—something that was caused by a customer’s error, failure or omission. After listening, I direct them back to the language of the standard. ISO 9001 doesn’t have an escape clause for when the customer screws up. It doesn’t say that it’s okay to guess at customer requirements if they don’t give you adequate information or that you’re off the hook for any other customer-spawned snafu. With few exceptions, you can’t blame the customer for your failure to fulfill their requirements. The attempt to abdicate responsibility is particularly egregious in those instances where you have long established relationships with clients. Some of the practices that regularly affect fulfillment of the customer contract are: In each of these instances, the organization throws up its hands and says, “It’s not our fault. This customer does this to us all the time.” As with everything else that goes awry, assigning fault is a fruitless pursuit. Blaming the customer gets you nowhere. The customer may not always be right, but the customer is always the customer, and without customers you’re out of business. So get over it and decide what you’re going to do. Since you already have a track record with a customer, you should have data about their practices that create obstacles to your ability to serve them. Look to your processes and the ISO 9001 requirements for guidance. Three sub-clauses should help you out. Consider the following: 7.2.3 Customer communication. This last bullet links directly to the next ISO 9001 requirement on the list: analysis of data. 8.4 Analysis of data The analysis of data does more than just provide ammunition for discussions with customers. It should help you solve the problems. This takes us to the last ISO 9001 sub-clause on the list: preventive action. 8.5.3 Preventive action Have you, in effect, implemented the requirements of your preventive action procedure and asked: “What could go wrong?” “What would cause it to go wrong?” and “What should we do about it?” Just because your customer’s processes are inadequate or uncontrolled doesn’t mean yours have to be. The focus of ISO 9001 is to achieve customer satisfaction by fulfilling customer requirements in spite of the customer’s shortcomings. Quality Digest does not charge readers for its content. We believe that industry news is important for you to do your job, and Quality Digest supports businesses of all types. However, someone has to pay for this content. And that’s where advertising comes in. Most people consider ads a nuisance, but they do serve a useful function besides allowing media companies to stay afloat. They keep you aware of new products and services relevant to your industry. All ads in Quality Digest apply directly to products and services that most of our readers need. You won’t see automobile or health supplement ads. So please consider turning off your ad blocker for our site. Thanks, Denise Robitaille is the author of thirteen books, including: ISO 9001:2015 Handbook for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses. She is chair of PC302, the project committee responsible for the revision to ISO 19011, an active member of USTAG to ISO/TC 176 and technical expert on the working group that developed the current version of ISO 9004:2018. She has participated internationally in standards development for over 15 years. She is a globally recognized speaker and trainer. Denise is a Fellow of the American Society for Quality and an Exemplar Global certified lead assessor and an ASQ certified quality auditor. As principal of Robitaille Associates, she has helped many companies achieve ISO 9001 registration and to improve their quality management systems. She has conducted training courses for thousands of individuals on such topics as auditing, corrective action, document control, root cause analysis, and implementing ISO 9001. Among Denise’s books are: 9 Keys to Successful Audits, The (Almost) Painless ISO 9001:2015 Transition and The Corrective Action Handbook. She is a frequent contributor to several quality periodicals.Pesky Customers
Using preventive action
Many of you have probably had the occasional insane day when you thought: “This job would be so much easier if we didn’t have customers to deal with.” Apart from the demands for price concessions and the requests for unreasonable deliveries, there are a whole group of customer traits that can drive us batty.
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Denise Robitaille
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